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The Role and Future of Psychotherapy Within Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

John Rickman
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Extract

1. It may be well to begin by delimiting the term psychotherapy; to me it has two aspects:—

(a) It is a procedure of verbal interchange between patient and doctor in which the phenomena presented by the patient to the doctor during interview are interpreted by the doctor to the patient—to the end that the patient's mental pain shall be relieved (by the interpretation) and he shall have an increased understanding and mastery of the impulse-laden, unresolved, emotional conflicts in his own personal past experience, and a better insight into his own personality.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Information
Journal of Mental Science , Volume 96 , Issue 402 , January 1950 , pp. 181 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1950 

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References

Note

∗ The second, and minor, omission, was pointed out by Dr. Bierer in the discussion viz, that not all of psychotherapy is a verbal interchange. I should know that: in the course of an analysis of a very disturbed schizophrenic with depressive features the patient hid herself within her only garment, a blanket, so that only the eyebrow showed; nothing daunted I continued the conversation from where we left off last time and noted the changes in that eloquent but only visible member, which changes—a frown, scowl, surprise, a flicker of amusement, a softening of the curve—indicated the changes of her mood and thought. My surmises proved correct for when next she displayed her face and used her voice she corroborated the general trend of my guesses as to what had gone on in her mind. That session was no verbal interchange—it might even be called an “eye-brow” anaysis but there was an endeavour to verbalize, to conceptualize and make concrete “in the here and now” what was occurring concurrently in her mind. Google Scholar

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